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Gravers Lane Gallery opens in former Intermission home

Ken Goldenberg (from left), Mike Tracy and Robert L. Smith are three of the four owners of the new Gravers Lane Gallery in Chestnut Hill. (The fourth is Chestnut Hill resident Amse Hammershaimb.)——Photo by Bruce Kravetz

by Bruce Kravetz
Yet another art gallery has opened in Chestnut Hill. The Gravers Lane Gallery (GLG) made its debut on April 8 at 8405 Germantown Ave., formerly the home of Intermission for many years.

I was there an hour before the first show and was surprised how relaxed the atmosphere was. As a former gallery owner myself, I definitely know how stressful an opening can be. At 6 o’clock the party began, and after a short while it was shoulder to shoulder. One could hardly move when the NBC 10 news network cameras arrived along with anchor Dawn Timmeney, who just happens to be married to one of the owners, Mike Tracy. They live in Mt. Airy.

The first one-person show at GLG last month consisted of paintings by Felice Saldutti, 61, who was born in Italy, grew up in Philadelphia and currently lives in Mt. Airy.

The Gravers Lane Gallery is the creation of four people with a dream:

•Mike Tracy, 58, has been involved extensively in marketing and has lived in several countries, including 10 years in Amsterdam, Holland. Mike also lived for a few years just outside Antwerp, Belgium, plus another three years in Tehran, Iran, and during the height of the 1960s’ youth movement in the storied Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

•Robert L. Smith, 58, is a photographer originally from Yorkshire, England. He has had an impressive number of shows in well-established galleries throughout Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and has won many awards. He lived in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, for 10 years, where he owned an art photography gallery.

•Ken Goldenberg, 55, founder and president of the Goldenberg Group TGG, is a real estate developer. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was an environmental attorney during the 1980s. He travels often to Kenya, where he donates his time and money helping women with AIDS, assisting with building centers that help the handicapped, and raising money to help children go to school.

•Amse Hammershaimb, 31, a resident of Chestnut Hill, is a consultant to Gravers Lane Gallery. Her father is Danish, and her grandmother is a direct descendent of Samuel Adams. Her mother is from the Philippines. Amse is primarily active as a gallerist in the visual arts. She began her career in her teens, cataloguing and consulting for private and corporate collections, universities and galleries both internationally and in the U.S. She continued her consulting while completing her studies in art history at Bryn Mawr College and founding her own arts consulting company, EAH Gallery, Inc.

The gallery’s second show, exhibiting the work of David Moore, opened May 14 and will run through June 5. Moore has a reputation in Boston that was built on exhibitions of glowing reductive paintings that have a beautiful nuanced surface. He earned his MFA degree in painting at Bard College, NY, where he also studied Theosophy, Sufism, music, photography and the luminist paintings of the Hudson Valley.

David’s musical experience has also influenced his paintings. For the past 35 years he has revived the lost art of playing the Musical Saw. He performs and records across the country, and has been featured at Boston Symphony Hall, on “The Today Show” and on NPR. More information at 215-247-1603, graverslanegallery@gmail.com or www.graverslanegallery.com

Bruce Kravetz, who wrote this article, owned an art gallery in Rochester, New York, from 1965 to 1975 and produced two shows for public television, one in this country and the other in Perth, Australia. He has had exhibits of his own photographs at galleries in Philadelphia and elsewhere. He says that in his 71 years he “could not even begin to count the number of gallery openings I have been to, in addition to the ones I had with my own gallery.”